A Humboldt State student is being questioned by police this morning after posting threatening statements on the Internet, apparently via a controversial social media app.

In an email blast sent out to the entire campus community earlier today, the university stated that freshman Liang Huang was detained earlier this morning following “reports received from a number of students about a threat to set off a bomb on campus.” The email said that the comments had been posted on an unidentified website last night.

A few minutes ago, Jarad Petroske, a university public information officer, told the Outpost that Huang is being “very cooperative” with police, and has not been arrested.

Petroske declined to identify the website where the comments were posted, but HSU’s student newspaper, The Lumberjack, earlier today posted two screenshots of conversations that had taken place last night on a newish app called Yik Yak, which has garnered quite a reputation in the last few months.

One of the messages posted by The Lumberjack reads:

I’m gonna *kaboom* HSU

And the other, which is a comment in reply to another person’s post, says:

Stfu .. this place suck I kill all of you !! Don’t go to school tmr cause I’m going to bomb this shit hole !?!?

(See both messages on The Lumberjack’s Facebook post, which is embedded below.)

Yik Yak has two features which seem to set it off from the rest of the social media universe. In the first place, it is geospecific — readers can only see Yik Yak posts (“yaks”) if they are within 10 miles of the place the yak was posted. Secondly, it is 100 percent anonymous.

Last month The New York Times ran a story on the use and abuse of Yik Yak on American colleges campuses, where, the paper notes, the app seems to have become the delivery vehicle of choice for threats and hate speech. Quoth The Times:

Since the app was introduced a little more than a year ago, it has been used to issue threats of mass violence on more than a dozen college campuses, including the University of North Carolina, Michigan State University and Penn State. Racist, homophobic and misogynist “yaks” have generated controversy at many more, among them Clemson, Emory, Colgate and the University of Texas. At Kenyon College, a “yakker” proposed a gang rape at the school’s women’s center.

(See also these defenses of Yik Yak in Wired and Slate, both of which were written in direct response to  the Times story. The Slate article includes the curious fact that Yik Yak was invented by two fraternity brothers, and was rolled out through the national frat bro network.)

How did Humboldt State University police come to suspect freshman Liang Huang as the author of the yaks in question, given the app’s hypervigilant anonymity requirements? That is unknown at the time. Did the yaks in question promise an actual, physical threat to the campus? One would think not. Should such threats, even if empty, be punished anyway? That’s a matter for debate — something HSU is good at — but this morning’s email blast from the university took pains to note that Luang faces “sanctions for student conduct violations,” whether or not he ends up being charged with a criminal offense.

See yaks collected by The Lumberjack below: